How suffering may serve for eternal blessing

„Behold, it was for my welfare that I had great bitterness; but in love you have delivered my life from the pit of destruction,  for you have cast all my sins behind your back.“ (Isaiah 38:17)  

God sometimes uses great suffering to produce great salvation. Things that we don’t understand at the moment may serve for our eternal blessing. 

Wilhelm Busch once told the following true story about a man named Amsel. It makes clear how God sometimes uses suffering to completely redirect a person’s life—and how He turns it into blessing: 

“[Amsel] had been a big, strong man who didn’t care about God or the devil. One day he had slipped under the rocks at the mine. I heard that he had become paralysed. So I set out to visit him. 

I met him in his flat. He was sitting in a wheelchair. Around him were a few buddies. When I appeared in the doorway, a hellish roar went up: ‘Well, you priest? Where was your dear God when the rock hit me? Go to the devil with your claptrap!’” 

It was so terrible that I couldn’t utter a word and went away quietly. But now a few faithful miners took care of him. They showed him the way to Jesus, in whom God gives us His salvation. A great change took place in the man. He found forgiveness of his sins and complete peace with God. 

On another occasion I visited him. He was sitting in the wheelchair on the street in front of his house. The two of us had become good friends by then, on first name terms with each other. I sat down next to him on the front steps. I could tell he wanted to say something important to me today. And that was what happened: 

“You know”, he said, “I have the impression that I won’t live much longer on this earth. But I now know where I’m going when I close my eyes here. Then when I come before God, I will fall down before him and thank Him for breaking my spine!” 

“O Amsel! What are you saying?” I cried out. 

But he only smiled and explained, “If this had not come, then I would have continued on my path of perdition far from God—all the way into hell. God had to take hold of me if he wanted to draw me to his Son, my Saviour. Yes, it was hard. But—it was for my eternal salvation.” 

He paused. And then he said slowly, “It is better to enter heaven as a cripple than to jump into hell as a healthy person with two legs”. 

I grasped his hands, “Amsel! You have been through hard training in the school of God. But—it was not in vain. You have learnt your lesson”. 

And we thought with shock of all the people who experience hard things—and yet do not hear the loving voice of God in them.” 

J.P.S.